FINDING ANTIPODAL POINT GRASPS ON IRREGULARLY SHAPED OBJECTS

Two-finger antipodal point grasping of arbitrarily shaped smooth 2-D a nd 3-D objects is considered. An object function is introduced that ma ps a finger contact space to the object surface. Conditions are develo ped to identify the feasible grasping region, F, in the finger contact space. A ''grasping energy function,'' E, is introduced that which is proportional to the distance between two grasping points. The antipod al points correspond to critical points of E in F. Optimization and/or continuation techniques are used to find these critical points. In pa rticular, global optimization techniques are applied to find the ''max imal'' or ''minimal'' grasp. Further, modeling techniques are introduc ed for representing 2-D and 3-D objects using B-spline curves and sphe rical product surfaces.